Rigoberto Diaz -
As a trained nurse, Jose Antonio Torres can help save lives — but in Cuba’s labour market, he finds riding a bicycle rickshaw a surer way to feed his four children.
“I can earn the same in a day doing this as I would in one month working as a nurse,” says Torres, 38.
The communist island’s gradual economic opening-up has created an earnings gulf between the few private workers and the many employed by the state.
Torres and others like him — even television actors — are turning to the private side to work as waiters, taxi drivers and more.
Torres owes his nurse’s training to the system of free universal education and healthcare introduced after Fidel Castro’s communist revolution.
In a country hailed for the quality of its healthcare, he was employed in one of the best hospitals — for just $20 a month.
Meanwhile, more and more foreign tourists started arriving with cash in their pockets to pay for rickshaw rides. The economic pull was too strong to resist.
“It was not an easy decision,” he says. “But I had to find another way to keep supporting my family.”
Beatriz Estevez, 26, is about to finish her state-funded university law studies.
But instead of heading to work in a law firm, she is dressing up as a fairy and going to stand still for hours while tourists put money in her hat.
“In a law firm I will not earn even half what I earn right now as a living statue,” she says.
She can earn $20 a day as a fairy. The average monthly wage for a public sector worker is $29.
UNESCO says 3,300 out of every 100,000 people went through higher education in Latin America overall last decade — but the figure for Cuba was five times that.
Yet university enrolments have since plunged, from more than 600,000 in the 2009 academic year to 173,000 in 2014, according to the national statistics office.
The Caribbean island is facing historic changes. Fidel Castro died in November and his brother Raul has announced he will step aside as president in February 2018.
Following the reforms of recent years, about half a million of the island’s 11 million inhabitants are now self-employed.
They earn four times as much as state employees on average, official data indicate.
“I do not mind admitting that I studied law but don’t want to practise it,” says Estevez, as she puts on her makeup in front of the mirror. “Everyone knows why these things happen.”
Defenders of Cuba’s communist system say its social security provisions, with food subsidies and ration books, protect the poor.
But experts warn ordinary Cubans are suffering from a wonky economy.
Despite Raul Castro’s reforms, Cuba is lagging in its search for foreign investment.
Its dual currency system fuels inflation.
“Buying a pair of shoes takes up your whole month’s salary,” says Torres.
Raul Castro himself admitted in April 2016 that current salaries and pensions “are not sufficient to satisfy basic needs”.
Salaries have never fully recovered from the economic crisis sparked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, says Pavel Vidal, a Cuban economist at Pontifical Xaverian University in Colombia.
“I cannot imagine how any worker in Latin America can survive on $25 a month.”
Another economist, Pedro Monreal, estimates that to regularly afford the basic necessities, a Cuban would need to earn four times the current average wage.
Experts are sceptical about the government’s hopes of boosting the island nation’s state-controlled industries to get out of trouble.
“It is not about sitting down to wait for production to drive up salaries,” said another Cuban economist at Xaverian University, Mauricio de Miranda.
“Production is not rising due to restrictions the government itself imposes.” — AFP
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